january 2nd, 2023

continuing to fight the brave & hubristic & futile fight of thinking i can actually be normal with my every
thought process being in some way underlain by the unwavering tension of being objectively "the opposite
of what i am actually supposed to be" in a very non-negotiable binary way that's plain as day to see

each time i report something happy & good here it should in all honesty be followed, like a non sequitur, with
"i am, of course, however, not even actually female, & it is in only in my nature that that inexorably forces
me to regard my life as a kind of slow coasting towards death at the end of the day. but the events i have
described here did take a chunk of all this time i am obliged to pass, & render it very painless"

i would not include such a thing because it makes me very sad to think of taking the conceptual afterimage
of myself that i form through my self-expression & become in other people's heads, & saddle it with such
a consistent dourness. the idea of doing that makes me sad enough that it bypasses the apathy that
would be easy to take on amid the condition described in the previous paragraph

i do not think about any of this when i am happy, but once it all comes back i examine
my happiness in retrospect & see only a temporary blissful blindness to the invalidation
that nonetheless persisted over me like a storm cloud. it is an objective quality
for me that i can only achieve blindness to for lucky spans of time

i know that the idea of "invalidation" even at the most general level exists lightyears away
from any notion of objectivity. but i can't see past it. it's outside of my ability to do
that. it's objective to me. i can only recognize subjective blindness to its unflinching
realness. my body is provably real so it can only be provably real to me in turn

of course, since sometimes i am blind to this entire mode of reasoning, it kind of splits me into two totally
different ecosystems of processing myself, & i am free to call the perspective i'm typing from right now the
objectively invalid one too. it doesn't really matter which one i label because the situation is still painful

january 4th, 2023

(head feels like it's shifted into a noticeably "masculine" space as an effect of wearing that grey coat around everywhere. i think
i have to start bringing, like, skirts back into rotation if i want to feel "normal" again, which is to say, if i want my stream
of thoughts to stop feeling endlessly "snarky" in a way that does in my heart feel attributable to the grey coat

one could call this negotiation a bit cool & fluid & queer but only insofar as it occurs with respect to a self-perception
that would seem in the first place to be gendered to a point of embarrassment, i mean, having my brain affected by a coat)

picks up a jar containing the parenthesized thoughts floating in formaldehyde & inspects
it closely... hmm well is it really that bad to be snarky sometimes, what's the problem

january 6th, 2023

escapist fantasies about love & comfort are the only thoughts that i have ever found to be in any way
functional with respect to coping with my distress about my body at times when that becomes a necessity

january 25th, 2023

i don't think i would be able to force myself to verbal;y self-identify as a woman to a room of
people if i had a gun to my head, it's just a variable that belongs in my brain quietly set to
what it is & not outside, i think this can be the case & still have me not being non-binary

january 27th, 2023

(silently to any & all "same sex" lovers i have known & may ever know) help help i am at times
burdened along the fringes of my mind with a completely unnecrssary & meaningless wish to cling
to the particular objectivity of an arguable typological difference that my mind forces itself
to observe & gives completely meaningless primacy to but unofrtunately th

january 27th, 2023

i appreciate the intent but it's like, look, i just don't have the body parts that i actually feel suited to have, it's that
simple. it doesn't actually have anything to do with gender. that some of the clothing i wear intersects with my sex to
produce the image of being "transgender" is an incidental footnote to me, which has nothing to do with the physical
condition, nor does it play any meaningful part in my self-conception. i am long past getting roped up in the false
hope that, by continually rearranging the mental categories that i sort the world into, i'm gonna fit them into some
magic crystalline alignment where i somehow "realize" that my problem isn't actually a reality. &, to be clear,
progressive conceptions of gender do absolutely involve the dismantling of what, for any given practitioner, may
have previously been incontrovertible realities - "'men' are ___, 'women' are ___," & so on. but my problem
is not some false reality that presents itself with a false appearance of objectivity. it is just a personal
subjective reality whose truth i only have to query myself to verify, something i think i just have to practice
making peace with instead of searching for the right theoretical text that'll finally "liberate" me from it

february 2nd, 2023

having any hairs on my neck or chin that are stiff enough to feel with my fingers
has always felt intolerable, unacceptable, even if they're not visible at all

yesterday i scratched my nails slowly along my friend's facial hair & heard the crackle tktktktk & then they
touched my face & said, "smooth." & i thought, what? the stray bristle-hairs should have precluded this
comment. it had been a few days since i had done a sweep of plucking out every single tiny hair

there are some ironies to unpack here, where my face never even grew enough hair in the
first place to preclude that comment, that moment. but i felt that any hair at all was
terrible, that it pointed to my dissociation from how my body should actually be

but ultimately those sparse hairs functioned as the lead-up to this particular operation of bodily
self-acceptance, which turns out to be a social experience more in line with the bodily makeup
that the hair growth made me feel dissociated from in the first place - that is, a person
who grows little or no facial hair in a dimorphic capacity (rather than my "random"
capacity) but may be socialized to detest even a slight amount of it

for me, though, it was just that i had all the other dimorphic aspects of myself to take into
consideration when thinking about the stray hairs, such that even the slightest growth was taken
not as the random flux of the functions of the human body but as necessarily "male," as being part
of that general set of physical tendencies, of being work done by the follicles in service of that full
composite condition & the associated image that secondary sex characteristics work to create. so i
could only see it as contributing to the sense of totalizing wrongness, no matter how slight it was

consolatory as this may all be about the fragmentary issue of facial hair i do still feel pretty bad
about most other things. ok, facial hair is out of the way, but the contours of my hairless face
for instance have always done lots of the legwork for my sense of physical ruination

february 12th, 2023

everything i do is underscored by a sense of "i can't believe i actually came so close to actually existing & just ended
up not existing on the basis of an arbitrary binary biological outcome & that i now just have to exist an entire lifetime
as something other than me & that after that my consciousness is going to just cease without this having ever arrived
at any catharsis because it's not a physical possibility & that'll just have been the course of my conscious experience
& that'll be it, i can't believe that in some way i was so close to this just not being what's actually happening
& what i'm living tangibly right now & i can't believe that there is nothing that anyone can do for me
even if i typed this paragraph & they empathized with it so much that it made them want to cry"

february 13th, 2023

i have completely lost all faith in the act of being gender-variant. obviously this will not imply some kind of
regression to normativity, i will continue to drift in self-expression without regard for imaginary boundaries.
but it offers me nothing. it is just normal existence, as un-interfered with by arbitrary customs. i no longer
project onto it any false hope of relief, i no longer have any aspirations in it. my self-expression & its
fluctuation have nothing to do with the fundamental dissatisfaction of having to exist in
a body & i will not observe any more pretenses of them somehow being interrelated

i very very badly do not want to be this & my only recourse is ignoring how very very badly i do not want to be this. but it is
only a recourse in the sense that it blinds me to a sadness which can otherwise interfere with living my life, & "living my life"
is itself the act of being the thing i very very much do not want to be. so "living my life" can only be a desired outcome while
i am operating under the willful blindness of ignoring how badly i do not want to be this. i can only desire life on the basis
of a little loop of circular logic that finds no footing in any deeper truth & is thus subject to collapse at any time.
i don't understand why i have to live this, other than because i am a happenstance biological
object obliged to feel as a conscious subject for a subjectively long time

this is intolerable, & if there were any actions i could take that would conceivably bring me towards relief then
i would do them, i would say, "okay, i wish to see a certain reality brought about & i recognize that i must take my
own measures to make it happen, to the extent that i am capable," & i would do those actions to the best of my
ability. but everything is already said & done. there are fundamentally no conceivable actions to be taken or
directions to move in, there is no position corresponding to relief. it remains intolerable & there
is no response to be expressed except this stillness because there is nothing to do

my fears all come down to the fact that i am a conscious object & i have to continually process the horror of that. if i am
physically incorrect in some way that feels all-important it is because i did not come together right as a happenstance
biological object. if i have some kind of spiritual incompleteness for my entire life it is for being insufficiently
contributed to as a psychological object early on. if i am afraid of losing interest in someone & drifting apart
from them it is because i anticipate it as a fluctuation in myself as an objective psychological system whose
whims are unrelated to "me," the subjective "i" who perceives it & feels whatever it dictates that i feel

i guess the horror of being an object is almost everything, though. everything down to fear
of failing to make a living & starving to death is the problem with being a conscious object

if God existed i would say to It every day please please please please please please please please please please let me
physically exist as what i actually am & since everything exactly as it is would already be in accordance with Its plan
that It had had from the beginning It would probably say something very disheartening like "i created you in part
to hurt in this exact way & squeal it onto a 'website' so that people all around the world who can actually stand
existing in the bodies they landed in might read it & possibly be able to better appreciate that cohesion"

okay, okay, it's delusional to say i'm "supposed to be" anything. there is no encoding upon reality itself which designates a state i am "supposed to"
embody but happen not to. what i am feeling is a product of what i am, as one body & one mind which is a psychological sum of all my experiences
& perceptions. that is the only reality, & there is no "actual" reality to appeal to as the one that should be instated in place of this reality so that
things would be "correct." there is only this reality, which is neither correct nor false, & everything i feel comes from this reality, this
single life. everything i feel is the psychological flux of my actual lived lifetime. there is no appealing to what i "am" in essence
if not physicality. there is only one physicality, & there is only response to what i singularly am & am not

but then, if a person greatly prefers one painting to another, this is a blurry subjective thing but we can't really deny that it is a reality, that in that
mind no other opinion exists in place of that one. so is it a similar incontrovertible reality that i know what i am supposed to be & cannot be it?
how sturdy is that reality? if i internalize the paragraph above this one & take solace in the painful internal reality not actually being underpinned
by any "supposed to"s in the external reality, can that painful internal reality come apart? it doesn't feel like it can. it feels sturdy.
but changing myself inside is the only way to stop hurting so bad intermittently. the outside is not going to change

february 20th, 2023

sometimes i am scared that, even if i were to resolve all of my emotional problems, my sense
of bodily incongruity would again surface with its physicality & objectivity that are far
less fixable. & with its way of feeling like a thorough invalidation of my existence

& it would remind me that i am not even living my actual life, that all the labor i expended into sorting out
all my emotions, hoping it could make me happy, had not even really gone towards me but to the offshoot
of a person whose eyes i am stuck looking through. & that i still cannot begin living my actual
life, i can only proceed into an emotionally sorted-out version of this alternate one

everything feels very very hopeless sometimes, like i am expected to climb a mountain just so that
at the summit i can be granted the privilege of trying to climb a slippery mile high flagpole.
like i am incrementing some great number in anticipation of multiplying it by zero

the incongruity feels adjacent to if someone close to you were to just wither away & die, & there was nothing
that anyone could have done for them, & despite the insanity of that tragedy & loss everything remains exactly
the same in its air of aimless commonplace-ness, & you're just obliged to continue living at the same
rate of one day per day because there is nothing else to do, & this itself is insane

i don't know that it would be reasonable to liken the mundane condition of existing in a sexed body, like any other
human being on the planet, to the gravity of death. but sometimes i do feel an adjacency with specifically that sense
of having to just constantly exist in the wake of something that is never going to change & that i do not want &
that i can scarcely come to terms with & that no one could ever do anything for beyond extend sympathy

like the sense that this shouldn't be happening is is like an immovable object versus an unstoppable force
in my head, i cannot rationalize it but it just keeps mundanely proving itself day after day, i just keep
existing & the issue just keeps proving itself as not distinct in any way from the same silent continuum
of reality that plays host to it along with everything else. it's a dismal truth that can only grow
more stale with the passage of time, but never relent, no matter how stale it gets

i just do not want this!

here there is also no equivalent to an event of death to hinge things on, it's just the
passive, silent truth of my physical makeup, which kind of just hangs & permeates

trying to be close with someone in july 2022 & the elevation
of the issue to its actual tangible demonstration just led to me
drunkenly crying my eyes out half-naked on porch steps :(

with the bodily incongruity, it's like, it doesn't feel like i... distance myself from the
overall system of dimorphism when i feel & express that discontent. it's within the system
of meaning that one constructs from being dimorphic (& bipedal & social & sapient &
yadda yadda) that i arrive at the sense of this being not how it should be for me

what i mean is that it's not like i am someone who, regardless of how they were born, would lament being
"trapped in some sack of flesh when really i should be an immaterial mind flying through space" or whatever

i think there is a tragedy to minds having to be tethered to bodies, sure... but i don't hold onto those
idealisms, i don't demonize my physicality in contrast, i just inhabit my condition of being physical,
i accept my humanity, i want to be what i am & measure the joy to be found in doing so

so that is what i mean by the first paragraph, i do not feel like i am arriving above the system of dimorphism
by transgressing it with an assertion that it was wrong, that i should be this or that & that i proclaim this
against it. rather it is within that system of meaning constructed from being dimorphic that i develop the
conviction of being at the wrong position in the system. the system is just indifferent to that & i have
no room to argue with it because it's too late. i feel like an animal born to negate itself

march 10th, 2023

all expressions of sexual dimorphism (which might as well just say, "all human beings (in their corporeal aspect)") feel like
they relate to my futile desire to escape from it & because of this i will at times encounter a picture of a person on the
internet which is circulating because it is funny, or aesthetically pleasing - or i will simply pass a person on the street,
or exist in a crowd - & be harangued by a sense that everyone is displaying a seamless normality in the face of an
incorrigible terror & this discordance makes me upset in its own right even though i know there's nothing anyone
could even do if they cared (& they shouldn't care because my care is a burning psychological problem)

march 16th, 2023

i feel like if God were to appear in front of me & tell me with absolute veracity that my capacity for
empathy had been neuroanatomically diminished by my exposure to or production of testosterone to any
extent, even one which was by any reasonable measure far from pathological, i would probably kill
myself but fortunately that highly specific hypothetical event will never happen so i won't

march 18th, 2023

around age sixteen i internalized the notion that there is a specific wrongness that is identically present in
every last cell that makes up my body & finds concrete expression in the proportionate sizes of all of my
bones. i think i quietly carry in the back of my head a small irrational faith that something will at some
point appear & rescue me from my body, & that if i did not carry that faith i would be destroyed

march 22nd, 2023

if i took the condition of being human as an experience rather than as a concept then i could not
be intermittently paralyzed with distress about what sex i was born as because there would
exist only the single experience that is & not the concept of anything that could be

march 25th, 2023

what would have had to have happened differently in my life for the mundane passive experience of other human beings'
sexually dimorphic characteristics to not feel like some kind of incessant retraumatization, or am i just inherently this
way somehow... it never stops. how can something that manages to function for so many people as more of a
framing or backdrop element of life command so much primacy for me, why, how do i stop hurting

march 28th, 2023

sometimes when i can recognize another person as gender nonconforming i feel like i'm going to die
because they remind me that the negation of biological markers (the negation i actually need) has
always been sort of a hopeless cause & that the overall social project has always been just
a cultivation of therapeutic apathy about those markers instead. i don't know what to do

by typing this paragraph i either made an honest observation of my actual condition or
temperamentally aided in that condition's reproduction. & i don't know which one it was

if someone else displays that they're actually at home in the world, that they just needed to make an
adjustment to a worldly system (e.g. "gender presentation or lack thereof") as one step towards fully
inhabiting that condition of being at home in the world, it... reveals that their plight & mine never
actually had anything to do with each other. but those plights initially appeared similar enough that,

in some way, i feel unintentionally betrayed. i feel excluded. i feel like it was suddenly revealed that they had
been unabashedly human & comfortable with their humanity the entire time, while i remain inhuman & can only
long to be human. i am excluded from the humanity that it turns out they are included in. i feel resentfully
envious, maybe. i feel like i will now be left behind. not that anyone has decided to leave me behind, but
rather that i am going to be left behind in the same way as the corpse of a person who there was
no chance of saving. i feel like a grave that people will come back & visit on occasion

none of this is anyone else's doing. i don't think, "a person shouldn't have betrayed me," or "shouldn't have made peace
with themselves," or "shouldn't have done this," or "shouldn't have done that," nor do i resent anyone. none of this has
ever focused on any individual or group. it is more like how i relate philosophically to the general practice of gender
nonconformity. other people can feel partially like a mechanism through which uncaring aspects of reality display &
reaffirm to me the way that those aspects have placed me in a situation that hurts immensely. not that they are
objectified as mechanisms. just that they in their full humanity have this effect on me in a secondary way

i have a component in my system of personal meaning that essentially says
"if one does not equal two then i cannot live" & a perverse drive to develop
that component until it has the predictable effect of causing me to die